The utilization of augmented reality (AR) promises to transform graphics from an external entity to an everyday extension of human vision. Twenty years of application development which spans fields such as medicine, manufacturing, maintenance, smart offices, telepresence, and navigation, has shown the promise of AR to greatly benefit society. The advent of high performance and low cost motion and depth sensors, color cameras, and mobile processors has made AR commercially viable. However, despite these advancements, very little use of AR is currently found by the public or industry.
The core problem is believed to be that current displays are too limited to allow most AR applications to be successfully deployed. To support a general array of applications, an AR display should have high image quality, preserve most depth cues, support mutual occlusion between real and virtual objects, and have a wide field-of-view so that objects do not unrealistically disappear and reappear as they come in and out of the display's field-of-view. The display should also be non-encumbering since so that it can be used throughout the day use for hours of daily work and leisure activities. Although it is recognized that a less capable augmented reality display may be appropriate for specialized applications, it is believed that widespread adoption of AR relies on a widely applicable display featuring all of these attributes; however, no such previous device exists.